The latest avatar from Kinzart adds to the collection of dragon avatars that the creator has forged in the past few years. This one carries a unique spin on a particularly popular one from a 2010 movie.
Out of the Box:
| Features | Specifications |
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Observations:
Build and Skin:
- This avatar comes in only two colours; black and white, therefore called Midnight and Dawn Dragons respectively. The textures employed over the avatar are generally consistent, moving between gentle shades of white or black and a few smooth patches of textured scales. This means that we manage to see a good amount of scales, but they don’t ‘stick out’ as much as if this avatar was completely covered by textured scales.
- The avatar comes with both a male and female shape, as well as a Mature female skin with nipples and female genitalia. (Click here to view the Mature Female Skin: CAUTION – LINK RATED MATURE)
- Build-wise the avatar maintains the standard Kinzart quality of avatar construction, with clean sculpts and a well designed look. The textures are continuous and merge well between the avatar’s skin and attachments.
Attachments:
- The avatar’s feet are your normal 4-toed clawed foot with sharp reptilian nails at the ends. On the top of the feet are some scales, while the bottom side is flatter and more skin-like.
- These Dragons are plantigrade, meaning that they only come with leg attachments to smoothen the transition between the feet and the body shape.
- The hands are similar to the feet in their design, though the arm/wrist attachments feature a group of spikes on the back of the arm.
- Otherwise, the hands come with posable fingers, as is default with Kinzart avatars these days. Each of the 5 fingers is articulated, and users can save custom poses for each hand, as well as use presets in the HUD.
- There are two tails that come with this avatar; one fully sculpted, the other is flexible. Both are pretty much the same in design, though the flexible tail is a fair bit less detailed. As you can see from the photos, both versions are your regular reptilian-ish tail, but with a good amount of textured scales and fins. Keep in mind that the sculpted tail has every single part of the tail sculpted, so the end result is that it looks far more 3-dimensional. With the sculpted version of the tail, users can also ‘open’ and ‘close’ the tailfins.
- Finally, before we move onto the head, we have the wings. You’ve got your fairly standard dragon wings with opaque membrane between the spokes of the wing itself. When in flight, the wings open right up and give the avatar an all the more imposing image. The tail-fins also open up as well during flight.
- Overall, the body and all the attachments are otherwise soundly designed and constructed.
Head:
- Before we get further in our discussion of the face, I’ll quote from the included notecard,
You’ll notice immediately that this avatar bears great resemblence to the famous dragon ‘Toothless’, a Night Fury from the film How to Train Your Dragon.
This is intentional, as the Midnight Dragon draws many of its design aspects from this iconomic creature.
- I’ve never seen this movie before, but heard much about it and seen pictures, so forgive me if I get anything incorrect.
- In short, this head looks much like Toothless from ‘How to Train Your Dragon.’ © Dreamworks Animation
- As photos show, the head is fairly cyndrical in shape, with very large eyes and a Muppet-like mouth. There are a few details like the nostrils and the semblence of ridges on the forehead of the avatar.
- Overall, it’s a very simple face, but it just works. The interior of the muzzle carries a similarity to ‘Toothless’ in that while users can do the usual things like stick out their tongue, you can toggle all of the teeth to be hidden away completely. The photo to the bottom-right shows how the removal of the teeth can really make the users look more like the originator of this look.
Otherwise, the eyes really do form a huge part in the presentation of this avatar, with the option to choose between slitted and rounded pupils, as well as eye colour.- The latest detail in regards to the head are the 2 groups of horns on the sides of the head that move in the opposite direction of the face, adding some polish to this dragon’s appearance.
- About the only criticism I could afford to the head comes from a colleague who suggested that the face could have used some muzzle expressions, particularly because the character that this avatar is based off of has a huge amount of expressions in the movie. From what I’ve seen, this may be the case. In the long run however, it’s not absolutely necessary to have this.
Features and Heads-Up Display (HUD):
- The HUD for this avatar is user-friendly and extremely simple to use. The photo below shows the options that users have available to them. If you prefer text, there are a number of text commands listed in the included notecard.
- The avatar also comes with its own Animation Overrider for flight. This is a separate attachment that must be detached if one wishes to disable it. The flight AO includes hovering, falling, flying forward, landing, etc.
Customisation:
This avatar is marked as being modifiable and copiable. Thus, if users wish to modify the avatar, they can do so quite easily. Because of the head-shape of this avatar, adding a third-party hair may prove a little more difficult than usual.
Conclusion:
The Kinzart Midnight and Dawn Dragons effectively remain true to their inspiration, while making producing an avatar that’s versatile and fun to wear. For some people, this avatar could probably have made a better quadruped than a biped. However, for others who appreciated this movie and wish to bring a piece of it to Second Life, this is a solid avatar to do it with.
